Thursday, July 2, 2009

Hello it's me again. I took your advice about the proper procedure for transitioning my office over to that awful person who got more votes than me. Well now the State's Attorney's office is calling. The State's Attorney happens to be a dear friend and I don't want to be a nuisance, but he has this young shaver calling & asking embarrassing questions about some of those procedures I was advised to observe. What should I do?

AintMisbehavin' in Avon

Dear Aint,

Your LakeCountyEye appreciates every loyal reader, and is pleased whenever good advice is recognized and carried out. If your LakeCountyEye recalls correctly, you were advised in a previous Q the Eyehere to scrub that incriminating office of yours extra clean, and leave it in a condition where even a Las Vegas crime lab technician would be hard pressed to detect any evidence of your presence.

One enterprising ex-officeholder, according to a recent Daily Herald item, used Active Killdisk to wipe clean the office computers. Your LakeCountyEye recommended a Ford F150 4x4 for the job. While there is no substitute for what a 1/2 ton pickup can do to a hard drive, Killdisk meets DoD 5220.22-M Standards and is an acceptable substitute in an emergency.

But now you have someone from that State's Attorney's office sniffing around? Not to worry. While it's always a plus to have a SA or two in one's back pocket, there is no substitute for plausible deniability.

In your particular situation, what you need is a willing under-aged accomplice, and some feigned ignorance. Tell the nosy SA investigator that you don't know anything about computers and you asked your youthful charge to delete some unused e-mail addresses. If the young charge just happened to use Killdisk for the job, and happened to deep-fry the hard-drive instead -- then well, oopsie!

Enlist someone you can trust, a neighbor's kid, or a relative, or one of your children. Just make sure he or she is young enough to operate a computer but not old enough to be eligible to do hard time. No State's Attorney is going to throw the book at any pimply minor who knows just enough to get on the Internet and download some freeware that can turn a hard-drive into microwave ratatouille.